A little post-holiday reading

I’m back from two-weeks hard-earned holiday in the south of France. What have I missed? Over five-hundred unread RSS posts for starters. I’m not usually one for best of entries, but here, in no particular order, are some things that have caught my attention — too many for a deluge of elsewhere entries.

1. Erskine Design Redesign

   Colly has written a story for A List Apart (my favorite magazine) about the design of Erskine Design.

2. Happy Cog and Airbag merge

   This is like when two people that you've known and loved for years get married.

3. Background images no longer restricted to original size: explore the space with background-size

   CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders adds support for resizing images used in backgrounds through the aptly-named background-size property. Mozilla includes support for it, under the name -moz-background-size. With background-size, you can stretch or compress the background image horizontally or vertically, either absolutely or relative to the dimensions of the background area in which the image resides, with the option to preserve image proportion if desired.

4. The Font-as-Service

   Elliot Jay Stocks turns up on I Love Typography with a nice overview of the (current) state of @font-face services. Like Elliot, I'm looking forward to when Fontdeck is more than a stake in the ground.

5. 6 Ways To Improve Your Web Typography

   Michael Owens with a sprawling but useful overview for making your type better. He references For A Beautiful Web, Walls Come Tumbling Down and my redesign of New Internationalist — that makes me happy.

6. Converticon

   Converticon is a simple icon utility. It can import ICO, PNG, GIF, and JPEG formats and export to high-quality PNG or ICO files. There is no software to download and it's free.

7. 5 Sliding Content Techniques, Examples & jQuery How to’s

   A useful set of resources spoilt only by its list format and title. Please, hasn't five, ten, fifty amazing things been done enough?

8. Integrating the JQuery Cycle Rotator into ExpressionEngine

   I often see questions on the ExpressionEngine Forums regarding photo galleries. In EE Version 2.0 the Photo Gallery module by EllisLab is going to be discontinued but there are some other reasons for using Weblogs instead of the Photo Gallery Module.

9. 5 CSS3 Design Enhancements That You Can Use Today

   Another useful set of CSS resources spoilt again by its list format, title and the first comment that asks wWhat about IE 6 and IE 7?. Oh God give me strength.

10. The Definitive Guide to htaccess Techniques: Do’s and Don’ts

    With a relaunch of Stuff and Nonsense only weeks away, this couldn't have come at a better time.

11. Big Fonts in Web Design

    I'm a sucker for large type and this is a nice round up with some fantastic examples, many of which I hadn't seen before.

12. Photos of Handcrafted CSS

    My friend Dan has a new book and DVD coming out. You should buy it.

It has been a busy two weeks. Did I miss anything else?